Monday, September 24, 2007

The E-Disk Altima 416GB flash drive will be available in March of 2008; the proud maker of this device is Bitmicro Networks. This appears to be the world's highest capacity manufactured solid state memory device.

Designed for military use, the E-Disk Altima is packed in a rugged package that matches the 2.5 inch hard disk drive footprint. This 2.5-inch ATA/ATAPI-7 PATA solid state drive, supporting PIO 0-4, DMA 0-2 and UDMA 0-6 data transfer modes, will utilize the latest high-density single level cell (SLC) NAND flash memory chips to deliver an astounding storage capacity of up to 416 GB, while providing 133MB/sec burst with up to 100MB/sec sustained Reads.

Pricing is not yet available. A 64GB unit in a Dell Alienware PC costs about $900. This is probably a bad time to mention that I paid $600 for 16K of memory in 1980...

Science fiction writers need lots of memory to fuel their imaginations and enable the devices of their characters. Consider the schron loop from Dan Simmons' 1989 novel Hyperion:

The Schrön loop was tiny, no larger than my thumbnail, and very expensive. It held countless field-bubble memories, each capable of holding near infinite bits of information.. A man or woman could carry AIs or complete planetary dataspheres in a Schrön loop.

The E-Disk Altima may not be up to Simmons' science fictional standard, but having owned computers with 16,000 bytes of RAM, I think this is amazing.